Laid bare, true scale of the rail strikes chaos
BRITAIN will be paralysed by the worst rail strikes in three decades next week after crisis talks between rail bosses and union barons again failed to break the deadlock.
Industry sources said 11th-hour discussions with the RMT union last night failed to secure a deal to prevent a walkout of 40,000 staff that will shut down half of the network.
A senior government source said ministers would not back down in the clash with the unions. ‘Expect the Government to be very strong on this,’ they said.
The impasse means only one in five trains will run on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, while lines that open will operate only between 7.30am and 6.30pm. Services on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday will also be badly affected.
When the Mail checked yesterday evening, the only tickets available from Glasgow to Preston, in Lancashire, on Tuesday with Trans-Pennine Express were for a journey scheduled to depart at 4.52am. The latest service showing on the website was marked as departing Glasgow at 2.37pm, but there were said to be no available fares.
It was the same situation on Thursday and there were no services listed for Saturday.
The industrial action will cost upwards of £100million in lost ticket revenue, with wider economic impacts expected to cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
Talks will continue over the weekend after ‘some movement’ yesterday, a rail source said. But any hope of a deal appears increasingly unlikely. The Department for Transport said ‘the industry is offering daily talks to resolve the strikes’ and encouraged unions to ‘take them up on that offer and negotiate a fair deal for workers’.
RMT members at Network Rail and 13 train operators are walking out in a dispute over pay and job security.
Ministers and motoring groups last night called on local authorities to waive road charges during the strikes as more people are forced into their cars.
AA president Edmund King said: ‘If there are no trains coming into Glasgow and Edinburgh, say, and people have to go about their business, there could be a case for suspending parking charges for the duration of the strike.’
The difficulty of unions, rail bosses and ministers to see eye to eye was compounded last night by the announcement of further strike ballots by the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association.
The union said hundreds of workers at Southeastern and Great Western Railway will vote on strike action which could take place at the end of July.
MORE than 200 workers have downed tools at a Fife steel yard after claims they have not been paid.
Work at the Methil BifFab yard has been brought to a halt by the industrial dispute, with the GMB union declaring there was ‘no excuse for not paying your workers’.
John Wood, CEO of Harland and Wolff, which runs the site, said the walkout is a result of the ‘militant’ trade union.